Continuous Creation: Last Poems

By Les Murray

The final collection of poems by the great Australian poet Les Murray, Continuous Creation

We bring nothing into this world
except our gradual ability
to create it, out of all that vanishes
and all that will outlast us.

In Continuous Creation, the final collection from Les Murray, the preeminent poet of modern Australia recalls moments from his youth and wryly observes the changing world, moving back and forth through time and history with characteristic curiosity and an ever-fresh commitment to capturing the rhythms of life in verse. This collection displays Murray’s miraculous ability to reinvent language in order to plant his and our reality on the page, whether he writes about the Australian landscape (“Kangaroo sleeping / ahead on the road turns out / to be twigs and leaves”) or unsold books sitting in department stores.

Continuous Creation demonstrates, once more, that Murray was one of the great poets of the English language. As Joseph Brodsky said, he was, “quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9780374605643

Les Murray

Les Murray (1938–2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia in 2012 as one of the nation’s “living treasures.” He received the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. He served as literary editor of the Australian journal Quadrant from 1990 to 2018. His other books include Dog Fox Field, Translations from the Natural World, Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Learning Human: Selected Poems, Conscious and Verbal, Poems the Size of Photographs, and Waiting for the Past.

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